28 Pages | First edition 2002; this booklet is an edited version of a three-part article, which first appeared in the Sunday Magazine Section of The Hindu newspaper during Oct.-Nov. 1994 | Booklet | The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar | ISBN: 8170593638.

This work deals with the extraordinary saga of the clairvoyant investigations of the structure of atoms and subatomic particles carried out by the two eminent theosophists Annie Besant (1847 – 1933) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854 – 1934), around the turn of the 19th century. Besant and Leadbeater possessed clairvoyant powers and were persuaded by Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840 – 1921), a close friend, to employ their psychic powers to try and find out if there existed an ultimate constituent particle or atomic building block of which all matter is composed. This quest, which began in Aug. 1895, was pursued by them on and off for almost 40 years, right until Besant’s demise in 1933. Employing their remarkable psychic faculties, the two theosophists embarked on an ambitious programma of investigating and documenting in detail the structure of the atoms of all the elements of the periodic table, besides several crystals, chemical compounds and complex molecules.

In his forthcoming book The Image of God in Matter, Phillips provides further confirmation of the validity of the yogic psychic ability exercised by Annie Besant (1847 – 1933) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854 – 1934) to magnify subatomic particles. The source of this independent support is the Jewish mystical tradition called Kabbalah, which is based upon the cosmic blueprint of the so-called ‘Tree of Life’.

Phillips proves that this geometrical object embodies the mathematics of superstring theory and encodes the structure of the superstring constituents of quarks as clairvoyantly described by the two Theosophists. He shows that Jewish mysticism, as well as Pythagorean mathematics, share a common ground with recent scientific discoveries about the nature of matter and space-time, whose relation to higher realities is proved to confirm certain Theosophical teachings. Clairvoyant, mystical and scientific insights are shown to be in harmony with one another, because each expresses in its own way the profound truth, that matter ultimately embodies the nature of God symbolised by the ‘Tree of Life’.

From the Conclusion (p. 243):

” With the information revealed in ‘Occult Chemistry’ a great expansion of our knowledge of Chemistry lies in front of us. It is just because this expansion is inevitable, that our clairvoyant investigators have toiled patiently for thirty years. They have claimed no recognition from chemists or physicists, because clearly will sooner or later be woven into the whole fabric of truth. The fact that this generation of scientists hardly knows anything at all of an extraordinary work of research extending for thirty years matters little, when we contemplate the long vistas of scientific investigations which the imagination sees awaiting mankind. “

This paper presents evidence of how facts of nuclear particle physics have confirmed purported, psychic descriptions of subatomic particles. It is because Annie Besant (1847 – 1933) and Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854 – 1934) finished their observations many years before pertinent scientific knowledge became available that their work cannot be dismissed as fraudulent. Nor can their observations be interpreted as precognitive visions of future ideas and discoveries of physics. Besant and Leadbeater claimed that they used one of the eight yogic siddhis (aṇimā) to study the structure of the atoms in every element.

From Chapter – ‘Micro-psi Investigations’ (p. 1):

” The Vedas and books on yoga mention siddhis, or psychic powers, which a yogi may acquire as a result of meditation, drugs, incantations or austerities. The Yoga-Sūtra’s, the earliest exposition of yoga written by Patañjali about 400 BC., describes eight siddhis. In Aphorism 3.26 of the Sūtra’s he states that a yogi can acquire ‘knowledge of the small, the hidden or the distant by directing the light of the superphysical faculty’:

pravr̥tty-āloka-nyāsāt sūksma-vyavahita-viprakr̥ṣṭa-jñānam |

In parapsychological terms the ability to acquire ‘knowledge of the hidden or the distant’ is ‘remote viewing’ of the world at large. The ability to obtain ‘knowledge of the small’ can, likewise, be interpreted as remote viewing of the microscopic world. It has the Sanskrit name of animā and is defined by writers on yoga as ‘minuteness, the power to become as small as atom, at will’. It has been given the self-explanatory name of ”micro-psi’. “